In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, teachers, immigrants, and socialists are fighting back against a far-right principal and Trump’s mass deportation agenda. On January 24, a Socialist Alternative member got up on stage at a live music show holding a QR code above her head, appealing for petition signatures. The petition was in support of Alondra Garcia, a public school teacher being targeted by her principal for standing up for her immigrant students, and for being a known activist and leader in her workplace. Her principal, Fritz Blandón, had placed a disciplinary note in her file and given her a one-day unpaid suspension that was set for less than a week away.
Five days later, on the day of her suspension, the petition had over 4,000 signatures. At 8:30 that morning, nearly 100 people gathered outside Allen-field Elementary to hear Ms. Garcia speak about the fight to protect her immigrant students against ICE raids. The goal was to send a message to Principal Blandón that working people, students, teachers, immigrants, and socialists would not back down in the fight against Trump’s right-wing agenda and Blandón’s attempt to implement it in his school.
As the petition created in Ms. Garcia’s defense says:
“All Alondra Garcia did was what the school administrators should have done in the first place – providing information about legal services available to families potentially facing deportation. All MPS schools are supposed to be covered by the Safe Haven program to do all possible to protect students and families from ICE raids…Principal Blandón at Allen-Field School has gone beyond placing an unjustified statement in Ms. Garcia’s file, towards a one day unpaid suspension scheduled for 1/29, charging that she sent a “political” message. The second charge supposedly leading to this escalation is her asking for voluntary donations from parents for our unhoused neighbors!”
In the days after Socialist Alternative, alongside Milwaukee Public School (MPS) teachers and Alondra herself, launched the petition, it was discovered that principal Blandón is not only a rabid Trump-supporter, but a proud and self-proclaimed bigot. His Facebook profile, which has since been scrubbed clean, was plastered with pro-Trump images and memes, including one where he bragged about showing off “all the bigot badges” the left had given him.
Principal Blandón is the principal of a grade school where roughly 80% of the students are Latino, operating in one of the most heavily segregated cities in the country. He is one of many who feels emboldened by Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda to attack brave teacher-activists like Ms. Garcia and her union.
How Did The Campaign Start?
After Trump’s re-election, many working and young people are feeling demoralized at the growth of the far-right. But we can have no faith in the Democratic Party on the national or local level, or faith in legal challenges through the courts to save us. Many people have a deep desire to fight back, and are just unsure of what they can do. So when working people and students saw a campaign to get involved in, many leapt at the opportunity.
Members of Voces de la Frontera, one of the largest immigrants’ rights organizations in the country, took real ownership of building support for the petition, which has been critical to the success of the campaign. Immigrants’ rights organizations need to be taking up these types of fights all over the country. Socialist Alternative members attended a large assembly called by Voces where we were able to reach hundreds of immigrant workers and young people who not only signed, but sent it to their families, friends, neighbors, and coworkers, explaining why they needed to sign.
At the beginning of the second day of launching the petition we had 400 signatures, and by the end of that day the number of signatures was in the thousands and growing rapidly. The next day, we built the petition at a left-wing church and a rally protesting Trump’s inauguration.
Socialist Alternative then hosted a public meeting three days after the petition was launched. At our meeting, we democratically determined that since Ms. Garcia’s suspension was set to occur in just 2 days, we needed to rapidly organize a protest outside her school during morning drop-off, with speakers including Alondra herself, talking about what the movement to defend immigrants against the right-wing attacks needed to do next.
Defend Alondra Garcia—Fight All Deportations!
We’re demanding that MPS not only let immigrant students and families know their rights, but actually distribute legal resources to families targeted by ICE—not punish teachers trying to protect immigrant students! Ms. Garcia’s union, Milwaukee Teachers Education Association (MTEA), needs to take the lead in organizing emergency defense networks that can respond to raids in our schools & community with mass direct action to fight against all attacks on immigrants. Under pressure from the widespread community solidarity, the MTEA did send out a statement in support of Ms. Garcia, but unions need to be at the forefront of fighting against these divide-and-rule tactics.
The petition has been an excellent organizing tool that helped us spread the word about the campaign to defend Ms. Garcia, but it has also been critical to broaden the campaign beyond attacks against Alondra. Trump 2.0 will pose a serious threat to immigrants, and we can’t just afford to wait and see what happens. We need to get organized around a plan to defend immigrants from deportations, starting now.
We’re now organizing to strengthen and enforce the current Safe Haven policy—under which Milwaukee Public Schools has vowed to oppose ICE actions on school grounds “by all legal means available.” The policy is a movement victory won by fighting back against Trump during his first presidency, and it provides something to build on. However, with the severity of the right-wing attacks on immigrants, we need to fight for grassroots safe-haven committees at each school made up of teachers, parents, high school students, and community members that could take ownership of the effort to protect our schools from ICE.
This can’t just be a fight to defend one teacher. We need to take the fight directly to the right wing, the billionaire class, and the hundreds of bosses and managers trying to dictatorially terrorize workers across Wisconsin and beyond. Socialists need to put forward more than just a strategy to take on one bad boss. We need to show how to build a broader fight against the slew of attacks coming at workers from the billionaire class and the right wing all across the country— which are being waged in the interest of shoring up nationalism, strengthening US imperialism, and making US billionaires richer. A key part of this fight will be building a more militant and democratic labor movement that can do things like not only advocate for immigrants rights in words, but also boldly take up campaigns of mass direct action and strikes in defense of immigrants and opposing all the forms of oppression inherent to the capitalist system.
Unions and immigrants’ rights organizations across the country need to take up similar opportunities to advance the struggle against Trump’s attacks. In order to be effective this struggle needs to be waged independent of the Democratic Party, which has never been on the side of immigrants. Workers, young people, and all those who support the fight of immigrants and are against the divide-and-rule oppression of the capitalist class need a new mass left workers’ party. This would also be the most effective tool to fight to win immediate and unconditional full citizenship rights for all immigrants, along with a $25 an hour national minimum wage, rent control, free healthcare, and free high quality education from preschool through college!